Across the nation.

New Puzzle Gleaned From `Stroke Belt' Death Rate

May 13, 1997|By From Tribune News Services.

SOUTHEAST COAST — The coastal plains of Georgia and the Carolinas have the highest rate of stroke deaths in the nation, with middle-aged people twice as likely as those in the rest of the country to die that way, a study has discovered.

Scientists have known since the 1960s that the three states and five others in the "stroke belt" (Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama) have above-average death rates from stroke.

When investigators at Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., tried to learn whether poverty and poor education play a role, they found a zone-within-a-zone of even higher stroke death rates. They called this 153-county area the "buckle" of the "stroke belt."

The rate of stroke deaths in the buckle was 2.1 times higher among people 35 to 54 than the average for the same age group in 42 states outside the Southeast. For people 55 to 74, the rate was 1.7 times the average.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute funded the study, published in Tuesday's issue of Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers got their data from death records and the census.

George Howard, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Bowman Gray, said his team did not resolve the question of why the "stroke belt" and its "buckle" exist.

"This has been going year after year for 50 years. If someone blew up a town of 50,000, there would be an outcry," he said.

Scientists suspect the higher death rates are somehow connected to quality of life.